…literary tomfoolery and other nonsensical musings…

Completely Normal

The first time he did something completely inappropriate I was about eleven. I was wearing pink corduroy trousers, and I might have been sitting on his lap. I’m a bit unclear on some details, but I do distinctly remember him unzipping the fly on my pants, about half way down. I thought it was a little weird that his hand was lingering around that part of my eleven year-old anatomy. Oh well, it must have been an accident, I thought. However, a few years after that, the lying down started. And other incidents of increasing inappropriateness occurred with greater frequency throughout my early teens.

Thinking back to the lying down, I feel pretty fucking disgusted, but at the time I thought it was a completely normal thing step-fathers did with their step-daughters. It started after my mother decided she needed a change of career and went back to school. She worked and studied part time, and was away from home a lot. I was excited for her because I know she absolutely hated her job and the horrendously long commute that went along with it, and also because we were both students, which I thought was cool. Her being away at work and at college was a lot harder on her husband than it was on me and my siblings. Mr. Creepy felt neglected and deprived of female affection and companionship, and since he wasn’t getting much as he felt he was entitled to from my mother, he decided to get it from the closest equivalent, her pre-pubescent daughter. Before my mom got home from work and/or school, he would take me into their bedroom and make me lie down on the bed with him in the dark. We were fully clothed, but he would spoon me from behind, and sometimes I could feel a distinct hard lump poking me in my back. We would lie there for fifteen minutes or a half an hour and then he would turn on the light and tell me I could leave.

As I wrote earlier, at the time, this seemed completely normal to me.

However, there were other incidents that definitely did not seem normal to me. Once we were at the computer in the bedroom playing King’s Quest. I was about thirteen years old at the time, and I was sitting on his lap. He probably asked me to. He asked me to do stuff that most people would consider to be shockingly inappropriate all the time. I was pretty focused on the game, so at first I didn’t notice his erect penis protruding from his shorts. That actually did scare me, so I hopped off his lap started for the door. He turned me to me while holding his hard cock in his hand and said, “Look at what you did! Look how big it is!” I didn’t know how to respond to that. All I could do was turn and leave the room, and I never told anyone about that incident until now.

Almost everyday he’d ask if I wanted to take a shower with him, and every time I’d say no. The first few times I thought he must he joking, but he kept on asking me over and over for years. You’d think he’d get the hint after a while, but I suppose no doesn’t really mean no to some men. It just means they haven’t managed to convince you yet.

And they keep on trying.

After a while he revealed to me that he found it very hurtful that I never wanted to take a shower with him. It was late summer and he had picked me up from swimming at my grandfather’s house. I was wearing my bathing suit. He pulled the car into an empty school parking lot and proceeded to angrily and tearfully tell me how I made him feel like a “fucking rapist,” for refusing to take a shower with him, and that he was shocked and hurt that I’d even think he’d do anything wrong. I guess he didn’t consider any of the weird shit he’d done and made me do up to that point to be weird at all, and that therefore I had absolutely no reason to be concerned.

In fact he was so sincere about me never fearing he’d ever touch me inappropriately, he stuck his fingers inside my virginal fifteen-year old vagina, he fondled my budding breasts, kissed me on the mouth, and then he took my hand and put it around the rock hard erection he’d gotten. After this he drove us the rest of the way home, and said it probably wasn’t a good idea to tell mom about what just happened.

He must have known that he had gone too far and panicked a little after that because the touching, the lying down, and the shower questions all stopped. Though he did once or twice tell me that it had been a week or a month since our “little talk” (as if I had could have forgotten) and asked me if I had any questions or wanted to talk about it.

No. Not really.

I kept it to myself for months, but after a while I told my closest friends. However, it would be years before I got up the nerve to tell someone in the family. I never told my mother because I was convinced her marriage would end if she found out. And it did, but she wasn’t sorry about it. I never told my father because I was afraid he would kill my step-father if he found out, and I didn’t want my father to go to jail for murder.

It would be another three years before I was able to move out of that house.

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3 thoughts on “Completely Normal”

The like conundrum is strong with this one. The words are powerful and the story, itself, is astounding. That you had to experience this, that you lost your childhood to this is enraging and vomit inducing.

I know I say this often and it does sound childish but I genuinely wish I had a magic wand to take away the pain and – more so – the memory. I also wish my magic wand would banish all evil such as this from Earth.

I felt the same way about liking your date rape page. I was blown away by the quality of the writing. You set the tone perfectly. The sights, sounds, and smells were all there and created a sense of place and time that just transported the reader there. But the content was horrific. Hmm…to like or not to like. It took me a while to decide.